Bill Kappele, technical director and instructor at consulting company Objective DOE, does a great job of teaching individuals and organizations how to use experiments to reach a powerful level of improvement knowledge. He’s compiled a list of 10 statistical concepts that every engineer should know.

Bill’s list is excellent. In fact, I believe his 10 key concepts should be known by everyone tasked with making process or system improvements. But because Bill’s audience is primarily engineers, the language he’s used may be hard for some to get through. Here’s how I would tweak Bill’s list to extend it’s value to a larger audience: Read the rest of this entry »

Fox News ran a story today that shines further light on the problem of healthcare quality: Medicine Mix-Ups Harm Hospitalized Kids. This is just more data characterizing the magnitude of problems in today’s healthcare (see earlier post: Hospital Errors and Accountability - The Beginning of a Six Sigma Journey?)

It is amazing to me to see healthcare struggling with such basic issues. Here’s a telling excerpt from the Fox News story:

“Researchers found a rate of 11 drug-related harmful events for every 100 hospitalized children. That compares with an earlier estimate of two per 100 hospitalized children, based on traditional detection methods. The rate reflects the fact that some children experienced more than one drug treatment mistake.

“The new estimate translates to 7.3 percent of hospitalized children, or about 540,000 kids each year, a calculation based on government data.

“Simply relying on hospital staffers to report such problems had found less than 4 percent of the problems detected in the new study.”

Wow! Just from the numbers perspective, healthcare-caused mistakes are near the very top of the Pareto diagram of things negatively impacting society. There’s no question that healthcare needs drastic improvement. The question is how and where.

W. Edwards Deming asserted that in every system quality is the result of the collective procedures, policies, and systems of the organization. Deming’s assertion directly opposes the notion that quality originates from the built-up good/bad efforts of individuals. Decades of time and countless examples from the world over have cemented the truth of Deming’s principle, so much so that anyone in today’s world wishing to argue against Deming might as well kid themselves that they can compete in the global economy using rocks and sticks.

Since quality is the result of the collective procedures, policies, and systems of an organization, the lasting solution to quality can reside in only one place—with those that plan, implement and manage the system! In other words, better doctors, nurses, and patients will not solve these problems in healthcare. A solution can only be achieved by those managing today’s healthcare—hospital administrators, insurers, politicians, etc. (Ironically, it is those same decision-makers that are the root cause of the problems experienced today. Take, for example, the unintended problems caused by the choices of Massachusetts’s healthcare managers, as reported by the New York Times: In Massachusetts, Universal Coverage Strains Care )

For nearly a decade, data has shown that almost 100,000 deaths occur each year due to preventable hospital errors. Accounts of botched medical services pepper news outlets. Even celebrities are reporting ill effects: Dennis Quaid, Glenn Beck.

Today, CBS News reported on what some hospitals and some state and federal government organizations are doing to begin to address the problem.

Providing care and medical services to a person in a hospital is a process—just as much as assembling a product or completing a financial transaction are processes. (The only difference being that a human being is the object that goes through the process.) For those reading who know a bit of Six Sigma, Lean, or BPM—imagine how much opportunity there is within the domain of healthcare to undertake process improvement work! And because healthcare directly affects the wellbeing of people, imagine the direct benefits to individuals and communities. This news story from CBS begs questions like: why haven’t hospitals started improvement efforts sooner? And: what factors in our society (doctor/nurse practices, economic pressures, government regulations, hospital procedures, insurance constraints, education, news media, etc., etc., etc.) allow poor quality to reach such deadly levels in the first place?

At least, in some quarters, healthcare providers are hopefully starting to approach the very basics.

iSixSigma performs an annual global survey of those working in the field of Six Sigma. The data is always interesting and always relevant. To review a webcast presentation of this year’s survey, follow this link.

For me it is always interesting to explore the differences (and sometimes similarities) between industries, global regions, Six Sigma role/function, and education background.

Proportions pop up everywhere in life — “Four out of five dentists recommend…”, “Obama leads Clinton by ten percentage points among likely voters in Wisconsin…”, “Last month’s manufacturing yields are up from a year ago…”, and so on. Anytime you calculate the fraction, portion, or percentage something takes up from the whole, that’s a proportion. And Six Sigma provides a method for you to discover if one proportion is truly different from another. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to thank my alma mater, BYU, for featuring my Six Sigma work in an article in the Winter 2008 edition of their alumni magazine. The article is titled, “Helping Companies Get It Right”. Go Cougars!

Can the principles of Six Sigma be profitably applied to any business effort?

A recent article posted on SportsIllustrated.com and printed in January 2008’s Soccer America magazine explains how Lew Wolff and his partners from the management of the Oakland A’s baseball team are using data, science, and objective decision making—what I consider the essence of Six Sigma—to successfully launch the new San Jose Earthquakes Major League Soccer franchise.

One of those on the ‘Quakes management team is Billy Beane, the originator and force behind the objective management methods that have led to success with the A’s. Mr. Beane’s ideas are outlined in the popular book Moneyball, where it shows how he uses statistics and y = f(x) + ε thinking to consistently achieve better results with less.

If that isn’t the essence of Six Sigma, I don’t know what is.

Michael Marx has published some great research in the latest edition of iSixSigma Magazine. It shows that soft skills (like verbal communication, team skills, leadership, etc.) are considered more important to success in Six Sigma than technical/analytical skills.

The news comes as no surprise to me. For many years I’ve cautioned managers and students that “soft” issues are the toughest part of almost all improvement efforts—much more often than technical issues. If you review your own experiences, you’ll likely find the same: when a project or effort has fallen short, was it due purely to a technical issue? Probably not. Instead, it usually was an organizational, interpersonal, or team issue that brought the project to its knees.

In my experience, those armed with only technical skills, even superior technical skills, don’t achieve nearly as much improvement as those who have developed good soft skills, even if their technical capabilites are below average.

My recommendation is to make soft skill training a foundation of your toolset. And resharpen your skills regularly. What’s the best way I’ve found: reading and rereading (and rereading again) Stephen Covey’s classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is my favorite resource for improving my capabilities of successfully interacting with others.

What other soft skill resources have you found helpful?

How do you know if you know? In other words, how do you know when you have sufficient knowledge to reliably improve or manage a process? More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin suggested a simple touchstone to answer this crucial question: Read the rest of this entry »

Six Sigma stands at a crossroads. It’s the same crossroads that many other industries have navigated. Do you remember when computers entered the mainstream of business?

Only twenty-or-so years ago, all business computing capability resided in the hands of programming and IT specialists. If you needed any computational or data power to perform your business function, you were referred to the computer department. They queued your request and later dispensed the results—a report, an analysis, a data query. The methods and tools of their craft remained mysterious to most. Yet their expertise in the arcane enabled the critical functions of business. Read the rest of this entry »